We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Photoshop CC. This version of Photoshop is a milestone release for the Photoshop team. Not only is it packed with fantastic features we’ve sweated over for years, it is also the culmination of a year of major change in our feature deployment process, moving from 24-month cycles of the past to delivering innovation to customers as soon as it’s ready, throughout the year.

In celebration of today’s announcement, I’d like to join with Barry Young, my co-director of Photoshop, to reflect on this release and our experiences working on Photoshop.

Dave Hackel, Director, PhotoshopMonday, July 13, 1992. Just out of college, it was my first day as a Mac Type Tech Support Engineer. My monstrous font training manual in front of me, I read through the various scenarios that led to a corrupted ATM Font Database and what to do about it. My name is Dave Hackel, and this was the beginning of my Adobe story.

I recently celebrated 20 years at Adobe and was asked what makes it a special company to work for. I joined the company for the technical vision that founders John Warnock and Chuck Geshke espoused, but that was just the appetizer for my experience here. The main course as a long-time Adobe-ite is enjoying a place in the company where I can directly interface with customers, whose loyalty and commitment can fuel another 20 years at the company. This relationship is what has made my last five and a half years on the Photoshop team so incredible.

The customer is central to the Photoshop team and we’re constantly looking for new ways to help you work faster and more creatively than ever. In the past, we have struggled to simultaneously build the next great release with amazing features like Content-Aware Fill, worthy of a two-year wait, while also delivering those less magical, but incredibly useful time savers you ask for like the Conditional Action feature we added in Photoshop 13.1 last December. This is why I am excited by our move to a more frequent delivery model. This new model enables us to develop features and fixes and deploy them as soon as they are ready.

An example of this is the Mac HiDPI work in Photoshop 13.1. We made a decision to deploy HiDPI for the main application so you could enjoy the benefits of it immediately after the hardware became available, but not the dialogs because they weren’t ready yet. We are now shipping the HiDPI dialog work including Adobe Camera Raw today, five months later (instead of two years later), in today’s Photoshop CC release. This also allowed the engineering team to listen to customer feedback on the first deployment of HiDPI and respond to it just a few months later in this release.

Thank you, customers, for your loyalty and commitment, which has fueled my 20 years at Adobe. I look forward to what the next 20 might bring!

Barry Young, Director, Photoshop:I’ve been involved in Photoshop professionally since version 3.0 in 1995. Back then I was working for a localization vendor for Adobe in Edinburgh, Scotland. My job was to re-engineer Photoshop and other Adobe products, into non-English languages. (Scottish is not considered a non-English language, in case you’re wondering!)

Even in the early days, I knew that Photoshop and other Adobe products, such as Illustrator, were ahead of their time. Bringing together art and science has always interested me, and no other company has been able to match Photoshop’s level of product excellence. For me, it’s a privilege to come in to work every day alongside many talented individuals on the team – both artists and computer scientists. We all share the same passion that our customers have for the product, and I hope that shows in the great features that we released with Photoshop CC.

Maybe you can help me, I’ve checked the Adobe forums and can’t seem to find a clear answer .
I subscribe to Adobe CS6 CC which includes Photoshop CS6 Extended. Some new features are being promoted such as using Camera RAW as a filter and updated sharpening tools.
Are these features available to me with my current subscription or do I have to add Photoshop CC separately ?

If you are subscribed to the Creative Cloud, you will need to download PhotoshopCC in order to get the Camera Raw as a filter. All of the new features are part of the PhotoshopCC, and are not part of Photoshop CS6, even if you got it through the CC.

But as a creative professional, I cannot justify the $50 monthly rental charge for your CC version. I, and the rest of the professional creative community, will continue to use the CS6 license that I purchased several years ago.

While I don’t work for Adobe, and am *deeply* concerned about the implications of this pricing in an environmental setting (I work for a University), I can say that in terms of a creative professional, you *can* justify the costs, and that the rest of the community will.

Consider the start-up cost and yearly amount required to maintain an up-to-date version of Master Collection in the old model ($3800 and just over $600/yr), or the cost just for purchasing and updating Photoshop ($900 and over $300 per year).

For the same price, minus the startup cost ($3800), full Creative Cloud members get all of the products and a number of services we never got to keep before (inCopy and a revitalized ICE for Muse catch my eye immediately) and updated more frequently. So what if they charge by month? You could just have easily divided the upgrade cost of a perpetual license by 18 months. And for the same price, Adobe customers get *more*–provided that they pledge to continue updating via a subscription.

As for Photoshop, it’s cheaper. Sure, you’re subscribing, but it’s cheaper, per year, by 300-400 dollars.

For a hobbyist, it is *definitely* a concern–after all, what hobbyist can justify the expense of constantly maintaining a subscription just so that they can use the software when they need it.

But for a creative professional, it’s entirely justifiable–more updates more often that are more affordable.

To reiterate–I’m horrified by the current models available to education (our sales rep at Adobe actually advised us that Adobe software was not currently a good fit for our university–great sales pitch, eh?). But from a creative professional standpoint, I think that this model is exciting, innovative, and entirely affordable. Moreover, it will give enthusiasts and on-and-off users a way in which to afford the full suite of Adobe products for the first time.

I also have this XP issue, like Ed. Window XP is the most stable operating system and upgrading to BULKY windows 7, just to install Photoshop CC is such a huge pain. Tried Windows 7 _bug ridden, bulky- as a software beta tester and was not satisfied so went back to XP. My CS6 creative suite works wonderfully well on XP, but alas, I am not going to try out Photoshop CC just because Adobe has decided to discourage Xp users from buying it.
Also, I must admit that this monthly payment system is a good marketing strategy in the initial stages, but you’ll soon have a number of very dissatisfied clients cancelling their subscriptions, just because you have not made it clear on forums that PS CC does not work on Os earlier than Windows 7.
Ah well, PS CS6 is doing just fine for me.

Hey there, I’m a user of the creative cloud for quite a while now. What troubles me with todays update that my CCmanager is telling me Photoshopp CC is up to date, but it doesn’t appear to be on my desktop…
Dreamweaver CC does show up and works perfectly though, any thoughts?

Okay, this is getting quite disturbing, I uninstalles Photoshop CS6 and still the new CC App is telling me that Photoshop CC is up to date. Even if I log out of my account and return, it still shows the same info. From there on I tried downloading Photoshop CC, which just led me to the new CC App, telling me it’s up to date…

Hello, I guess I’ll stick with CS4 until I get CS6 and that’ll be it for me, do the math, $50 a month that sounds very sweet for Adobe, but not for me. Professional or not still high priced. Thanks Adobe for showing me your greedy side.

$50/mo is not realistic. But im sure that will reflect in the number of people who chose to stay with whatever version they already have rather than moving to CC.
Perhaps its time to listen to the customers, rather than trying to justify greed and alienating hobbyists in favor of professional users.

“For a hobbyist, it is *definitely* a concern, But for a creative professional, it’s entirely justifiable”

Not “fair”, not “reasonable”, not “affordable”… just “justifiable”.
You can justify driving a car with your feet… doesn’t make it a good idea.

I have been a photographer for 40 years ( bugger , where did the time go ) and I have used Photoshop since version 5.0. Sure there are some great and clever new features. BUT ( and I know you should never start a sentence with but ) BUT none of them will make you a better photographer. Might just make you smarter or cleverer but nearly every world famous photographer who had real vision and knew how to make the best of their equipment and create world class images had NEVER heard of photoshop. It is a great tool but paying every month for the rest of your life will NOT make you a great photographer. Adobe are selling you an expensive dream. CS6 will do just fine.

$50 a month is a rip off. Especially as you don’t anything in the end and if you can’t afford it one month, you’re stuck without the software. Totally impractical for freelancers who have a lot of bills to pay etc. Very greedy Adobe, I have to say.

I would like to be serious here, you have a lot of bugs unresolved in previous versions of Photoshop and CC are still full of serious bugs.

Please fix the text engine and fire the responsible of that kind of mess, there are innumerable bugs on it.
I spend 12 hours a day using Photoshop and tried several times to be a Adobe Prerelease member to try to report all that bugs before you release a major version, but all my efforts were in vane.

Instead new features, you must improve your actual ones, like your archaic “export for web”, that btw should be called “export for 90’s web”

If you need more information about the bugs I reported (and your team simply ignored) drop me a line.
For your information, I started a petition in change.org to fire the person responsible of the text engine in Photoshop.

I am a serious designer and I’m not putting here any link. I love Photoshop, and I’m not gonna use other software. I only like you to improve it.

I found few serious bugs in Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC on Mac 10.8.4. Also Illustrator is unstable. I feel like beta tester and not end user who pays $50 every month. I really support the idea to improve core functions instead of adding lot of new functions for few users. Who needs to edit video, 3D, etc. in PS, majority? Barely…

I have to say Adobe has made some outstanding products. I have been using Adobe since the first version of photoshop. I want to thank you for the answers that you have supplied with CC. I appreciate Adobes need to generate profit, for me the benefit does not costs of Cloud Licensing, while Adobe is industry standard, I am forced to look at divesting from adobe products. I have to lookout for my clients best needs so in short term I will still use the adobe products that I have invested in but long term will have to look at other solutions.

I do understand Adobes need for profit and this system being in its best interests, I have to think about my clients needs and their interests as well as my own. So I will still use the CS products that I have bought but will start looking to move back to Quark, and to Aperture and Coral products.

I’m surprised to see anyone complaining about the new pricing model. I have no money and I think it’s fantastic. I was never able to ever dream of purchasing an Adobe product, hundreds or thousands of dollars, but now I can actually go “Hey, I might be able to buy one product for $20 a month.”
It’s not hard to justify. If you’re using their products then you must have a good reason. If it’s for a hobby, invest in the hobby. You have to buy paint brushes and canvases when you do art hey? If you don’t like it, use Gimp etc. And if you are freelancing, you will make the money to purchase the software, and you should be able to claim it as a tax right off, unless you don’t have an ABN.
Just renew the membership when you have a job coming and then let it run out, and renew when you ahve a new one. I don’t know about you guys, but video editing freelance and web design freelance makes me thousands, enough to pay for Adobe products. Currently I have none, but need my films edited for festivals and need Adobe story for collaboration, so I invest in my career/time/and hobby. You are all on serious drugs, if you think the old thousand dollar model wasn’t expensive. As for the universities, you have a constant update of products for an x amount per month/year. My old film school payed a fortune on CS5 for every computer, and now they can’t justify buying CS6 because it hasn’t been long since CS5. But if they had CC, they would have the latest updates and spend same amount.
I suppose Adobe could take $10 off, but besides pricing, the model should stay. We have instant updates, cloud access, collaboration etc.

First of all its really great to see both the directors of this awesome software “Adobe Photoshop CS”. I must say that we are proud of them. This amazing photo editing software has made impossible things possible…
Love working with my old Photoshop CS5… Looking to upgrade to the new version too.